Don't forget the Trinity site. You can walk right up and see the fused glass ground without dying.

In any event, the deconstruction and cleanup will take some time, but will be done. The russians could even tear down Chernobyl, but they don't have the money. Although, I think in the end they may find entombment to be more expensive. Especially as they will continue to fight water table contamination issues as long as they keep the slag on site and intact. There is no such thing as permanently sealed on that scale.

All in all, I am personally rather pleased with the plant design performance given the turnout for the magnitude of margins exceeded and mistakes made. We do tend to over-engineer in the nuclear realm.

The development of atomic power, though it could confer unimaginable blessings on mankind, is something that is dreaded by the owners of coal mines and oil wells. (Hazlitt)
What I want to do is to look up C. . . . I call him the Forgotten Man. (Sumner)

I'm impressed with the performance of Fukushima during the quake and tsunami also. The reactors themselves performed admirably, and scrammed as intended.

The problem is a classic loss of coolant problem due to failure of supporting systems. Three Mile Island was a tamer version.

Question: How many people died due to the radioactive material released at TMI?

Answer: (Found on the internet, but it looked well analyzed) None. Not even one whole person increase in cancer incidence.

Animals are thriving around Chernobyl. People are not bothering them. Its a lot less deadly than people tend to think.

I've heard all sorts of moaning that people can't do a Mars trip because radiation will turn them to mush. But looking up the actual data, in the absence of maybe a supernova or Wolf-Rayet star popping off nearby during the trip, the numbers may be more like a 5% increase in cancer risk over their lifetime.

The lesson from Fukushima should be this. Send two engineers out to a long lunch with pencils and a notebook, and brainstorm on just what could be done to improve backup cooling. And what they'll come up with is probably something like this. First, rig backup power to the pumps, for when the diesel generators fail, that allows you to power the pumps from safely off-site. Second, run some pipes or hose hookups in there so you can pump cooling water from outside the plant boundary. Third, maybe figure out a way to exhaust an H2 buildup thru a filter. There, done. The thing becomes a sleeping pussycat. Too late to fix Fukushima now, but these measures on other plants should be done and should not be hard or expensive.

And they should look, in contrast, at just how bad that tsunami was. How many people has the nuclear accident actually killed? Probably more suicides from the disruption of homes than from radiation, by a long shot, and with the right improvements, it could be a non-issue. How many people did those waves kill? A little perspective is in order.

Tom Ligon wrote:Third, maybe figure out a way to exhaust an H2 buildup thru a filter.

AFAIK, all US nuclear plants have catalytic H2 burners to prevent an explosive accumulation. GE recommended that TEPCO add them to the DaiIchi plants but TEPCO declined to do so. It wouldn't have prevented the meltdown or release to the ocean, but the atmospheric release would have been much lower.

Of course, if the Japanese had used the best international guidelines to respond to the accident, only the nearest ~5km would have been evacuated, and only another maybe 5 km^2 of additional area would have had the inhabitants relocated due to groundshine.

Not one person died because of Fukushima. Given the magnitude of destruction and death caused by the Tsunami everywhere around the plant, it could be argued that the plant was actually the safest place to be at the time. The radioactive contamination around the plant is not that dramatic either. Much is being exaggerated.

I actually think that is obfuscating the record. I believe almost no one thinks of "dying because of Fukushima" without presuming what is meant is that someone died because of radioactivity release. And no one did so.

…radioactivity.
Two drowned during the tsunami and two industrial deaths since. Just to keep the record straight.

Then they died in Fukushima, but not because of the reactor accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Of course I could have phrased all this to be 100% exact but I presumed that people would at least attempt to understand what I was trying to say.
Next time, I will write a 10 page paper with statistics, references, footnotes and a 2 page disclaimer just to be sure...

Skipjack wrote:Then they died in Fukushima, but not because of the reactor accident at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant.
Of course I could have phrased all this to be 100% exact but I presumed that people would at least attempt to understand what I was trying to say.
Next time, I will write a 10 page paper with statistics, references, footnotes and a 2 page disclaimer just to be sure...

If you do, they will think you are trying to hide something.
I liked you statement in this post more than the first. But maybe this is better. Nobody died, nor are many every likely to die, due to the radioactivity from the Fukushima Dai-Ichi accident.
Just an alternative.